Representing number in the real-time processing of agreement: self-paced reading evidence from Arabic.

ABSTRACT: In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes "attract" the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical number in working memory during sentence processing. Research in this topic, however, is primarily done in related languages with similar agreement systems. In order to increase the cross-linguistic coverage of the processing of agreement, we conducted a self-paced reading study in Modern Standard Arabic. We report robust agreement attraction errors in relative clauses, a configuration not particularl

SUBMITTER: Tucker MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4390991 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature